A Beginner’s Guide to Finding the Right SEO Company, Part 1: Red Flags

At SonicSEO.com, we’re passionate about SEO and making it work for our clients. We get upset when we meet people who tell us about their current SEO companies—the lines they’ve been sold, the underperformance they’re paying thousands of dollars for, the out-dated practices that make the entire profession look bad…seriously, it raises the blood pressure of everyone from the sales team to the applied math analysts to the copywriters!

Recognize Bad SEO Business

When you’re looking for an SEO company, you want a company that’s kept up with search engine optimization industry and understands that optimizing your website is a holistic process, not one that can be done in pieces and still be effective.

You can start finding a good SEO company by process of elimination. When you see these red flags, look elsewhere for your SEO needs:

An SEO company whose website is not SEO’d

If you Google “your city + SEO,” does the company you’re looking for appear in the first two pages of results? Try a few different search terms like “SEO consulting” or “internet marketing.” See them yet?

An SEO company who promises ranking results

Search engines are changing their algorithms all the time, and that changes rankings frequently, too. If a company promises they can get you to #1 in Google’s SERPs, raise an eyebrow.

An SEO company who says they’ll “submit” your site to search engines

You don’t have to submit anything to a search engine. It just doesn’t work that way. (We’ll talk more about this in Part 2)

An SEO company who gives strict limits on what they’ll do

If an SEO company limits the number of paragraphs on a page or pages on your site or search terms they’ll optimize for, watch out. They’re probably protecting their time and resources more than looking for ways to optimize yours.

An SEO company who parses out parts of the SEO process into different marketing packages or contracts

When it comes to SEO, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can’t just do some SEO stuff and not others. It chips away at the effectiveness. If a company is trying to bundle some SEO practices together but withhold others until you upgrade to a bigger package, look somewhere else.

In Part 2, we’ll help you understand why these practices are red flags. When you know more about how SEO should be done, you are better equipped to find the best SEO company that will show you real ROI for your internet marketing dollars.